Posts Categorized in Software development

At Redgate, we’re fascinated by software development and how to do it smarter, better and more intelligently. How do we reduce the burden of legacy code and technical debt, for example? How do we use test-driven development to make the code as robust as possible. How do we apply UX principles and skills to make the complicated software we develop intuitive to use?

The Preview release of Microsoft’s SQL Operations Studio marks a big change in database development. Following on from the ability to run SQL Server 2017 on Linux, it makes the promise of cross-platform SQL Server development a reality. Built on top of Visual Studio Code, SQL Operations Studio is a free lightweight tool for... Read more

With the craze over building Single Page Applications (SPAs), companies have joined the movement and hired armies of front-end engineers with/without experience in back-end technologies. To accommodate the new talent, many of these companies have built cross-functional teams. Simply put, it’s a team of front-end, back-end engineers, and other disciplines working together to deliver... Read more

You may already have heard about Microsoft’s new DevOps platform for database development, SQL Operations Studio, or “SQL Ops Studio”. The preview version was announced at PASS Summit on 1 November, and Foundry, the R&D division of Redgate has been researching the feasibility, practicality and appeal of cross-platform data tools for a while. You... Read more

Slow, unreliable tests prevent teams doing great work, and make continuous delivery impossible. This was true for our SQL Source Control team when I started working with them. From pushing a commit to getting a complete set of tests took almost 12 hours. Then you had to rerun the raft of tests that sometimes... Read more

On Friday, March 10, I attended the Working Effectively with Legacy Code workshop hosted by Michael Feathers, along with a few other members of my team. We maintain a difficult legacy code base and we were eager to do some practice and learn some useful techniques. The most important lesson I learned is that any... Read more

In this post, I’d like to introduce you to the Universal Architecture idea described by J.B. Rainsberger in the podcast Unit Testability and the Universal Architecture. Everyone wants to deliver software that works and delivers value to our customers. That’s a fact! Everyone wants our software to be easy to change and maintain. That’s obvious! Unfortunately, we... Read more

The following are just some of the anecdotes from Redgaters here at Redgate HQ when I asked them for their reflections on 20 years of Visual Studio. Almost all of our developers use Visual Studio every day, so there are a lot of memories to share: I’ve been using Visual Studio since VS6, 15 years... Read more

Software coding is never easy. We all know that. But what if you were given a challenge? In particular, what if you were asked to write a program to generate a maze, using any language you like, from Python to SQL to C#? The only constraint? To be able to demonstrate what you’ve done,... Read more

Mob programming is an emerging agile development approach for creating software. The whole development team gets in a room and works together on the same problem, at the same time, on a single computer. I spent a full week doing mob programming with my current team and I’d like to share my impressions and... Read more

A few months ago, we told you about some upcoming changes to our licensing system to make using and managing our products a lot easier. Since then we’ve incorporated user account licensing into the latest versions of several Redgate products (SQL Compare, SQL Data Compare, SQL Source Control, SQL Data Generator, SQL Dependency Tracker, SQL Doc,... Read more